Thursday, July 31, 2014

Last Presentations

Today in class we had our last formal presentations. Our assignment was to do a company comparison. The two companies that I decided to do were Amazon and eBay. Going into this project, I assumed that Amazon would overall be better and more transparent than eBay. As I started to do more and more research, I found out that I couldn't be more wrong. Amazon is probably one of the most nontransparent companies out there. They don't disclose any of their information to the public except for their annual report which is required. eBay on the other hand began to publish a CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) Report in 2013 and they have kept publishing it each year. In their report they reflect on their work in the environment and being good community members. What really surprised me about eBay's CSR Report was that they disclosed their carbon footprint and they shared that it was getting bigger but they also showed some of their goals towards reducing it.

We didn't get to finish all of the presentations in the morning so we had to finish them all after lunch. Before lunch, we got discussion questions for the second book that we were supposed to read called Strategies for Sustainability. I was sort of getting sentimental because this could potentially be our last lunch assignment but at the same time, I won't miss having to do them. After we ate lunch, we went back to class to finish the presentations. When we finished them, Aleen gave us instructions on our final assignment. We were to start a green blog and post five different times on something that we learned in this class. I was really excited about this assignment because at this point, I consider myself as a blogging expert so I knew that this assignment would come easy to me.

We finished the afternoon off by having our book discussion outside. Since we finished early, we were let go early. I started on my blog right when I got back to my dorm because at 6:30 PM, I was going to go to the Creative Writing Presentation to support Jimmy. His creative writing class were presenting some of their work and me, Dani, Alexa, Vicky, and Alie decided that we would go support them. I was really surprised at how talented all of the students were. I do wish that there had been a presentation at the start of the class and one at the end so we could sort of watch the evolution of the students' written works. I ended my evening by having a super blogging marathon in my dorm room while my roommate studied for her BioTech final.